Stockfish on Botvinnik (Stockfish on Chess Players)

$9.99
by Lyudmil Tsvetkov

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The present book is a bit peculiar, it features 50 games by chess legend Mikhail Botvinnik through the lens of analytical understanding of Stockfish. For those who do not know, Stockfish is the best chess engine on earth, which is free downloadable to boot. To tell you the truth, the latest versions are simply phenomenal, able to understand both chess tactics, as well as deeper arcane chess strategy to a level simply no human player can. That is a fact. So if you want to analyse your games, you grab the engine and go through your moves to see where you went wrong and how you could have proceeded better. For the same analytical purpose, the engine is great to analyse any player's games, and since we are mostly interested in the top, knowing better what precisely happens in the games of Fischer or Kasparov might be a dream come true. Because, even in the very recent past, we still were not that sure - chess engines were much weaker, did not understand strategy properly and would frequently skip the best variations, not to mention feebler analysis by humans, who often skip not only the best lines, but also do not understand well enough what are the best strategic continuations. That is a fact. Thus we have those 50 interesting Mikhail Botvinnik games analysed by the engine. I have used low thinking time, just 1 second per move, but rest assured at 1 second per move Stockfish is way way superior than any human being. At 4000 elos, Stockfish is currently at least 1000 elos stronger than the human chess champions, Magnus Carlsen, for example. Its variations are full of beauty and precision. For each game, for each separate move, we are showing Stockfish's evaluation, given in centipawns, full pawns and centipawns, if the score is higher. A centipawn is basically one hundredth of a full pawn material, so if 50 centipawns is shown, that means one side holds half a pawn advantage. 25 centipawns would mean one side holds quarter of a pawn material advantage, which is not overly big, close to a draw, however 2.50 would mean one side holds 2 full pawns plus 50 centipawns advantage, that is 2 and a half pawns edge. That is a lot, that is winning. 1.26 would mean one full pawn plus 26 centipawns edge, and when the score has minus sign attached to it, that means black actually stands better, since the engine's scores are always shown from the point of view of white. Immediately after the score is shown, the engine also shows its depth reached, so 20 would mean a depth of 20 plies reached, tantamount to 10 full moves. A depth of 40 would mean 20 full moves analysis, that's a lot by all standards, but Stockfish is well able to do it. At critical junctures the engine also shows in brackets the improved variations one side should have played, if a bigger mistake, or blunder, has been committed. A bigger mistake for Stockfish means selecting a suboptimal move, inferior to the best continuation by more than 80 centipawns material, or close to a full pawn. A full pawn would be winning. Half a pawn difference in score amounts to a palpable mistake, but still not quite blunder. Going astray by 20 centipawns is unsubstantial, some smaller inaccuracy, but when you add up three or four such smaller mistakes, you might be losing the game already. It's pathetic to see how Stockfish bashes even Fischer, thinking he all to often committed significant mistakes, not to mention the huge number of smaller inaccuracies, however lesser players perform even worse. On the one hand, we could be sorry for Fischer, but on the other, we should be very grateful indeed to have at our disposal such an unbelievable help. It allows us to dive deeper into the fathomless depths of chess, it allows us to behold beauty, and it allows us of course to learn quite a bit in the process. That's the point of the whole effort. In short, browsing through all the games is strictly recommended, because you will never find a better level of analysis.

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